I’d like to say a little more about what I meant last week when I wrote in defense of the principle of free public higher education.
And I’d like to say it in the form of a series of annotations to a joke tee shirt.
A few months back I tweeted that education should be free as in speech, free as in beer, and free as in Huey. A couple of days later I expanded on the sentiment:
Free as in speech. Free as in beer. Free as in Huey. Free as in love. Free as in bird. No MOOCs, is what I’m saying.
Folks seemed to like that, and when I noodled around with the idea in an airport bar a while later, the idea of making it a tee shirt was born. (The shirts are currently on sale as a fundraiser for this site. The sale ends tomorrow, on the evening of Wednesday, December 4.)
But what, exactly, does the shirt mean? Turns out that’s a little complicated. Let’s break it down.
Free as in speech.
The speech/beer/Huey tweet that started the whole thing was a riff on a phrase coined by activist Richard Stallman to describe the Free Software movement: “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.” What Stallman meant was that free software is a matter of, as he put it, “liberty, not price” — that the goal of the movement is to create software that can be shared, modified, and adapted, rather than just software you don’t have to pay for.
When I say that education should be free as in speech and free as in beer, I’m saying that I embrace the liberty goals expressed in the first half of
